Performance

There is 30-key rollover USB here out of the box, as Aqua's test helps confirm. This is plenty enough for any user even if he/she plans to use both hands simultaneously. Similarly, no key chatter was detected on all the keys using Switch Hitter.

When first connected to the keyboard, regardless of whether the software driver is installed or even running, the Apex M750 lights up in a breathing lighting effect set to high speed in a blue color as seen above. The backlighing is not as bright as I would have liked, and the transition from 0% brightness to 100% brightness happens too rapidly as well. In order to determine the color fidelity of the LEDs and backlighting here, I used the driver to set a static white to all the keys.


As with just about any RGB-backlit device, the white is not a true white here, and we have a light blue hue that is apparent even at full brightness. Once more, I was not very impressed with the actual brightness from the LEDs here as these just appears dull. On the plus side, with both the primary and secondary legends on the keycaps being near the center, both are illuminated uniformly.


I have here two more examples of the lighting effects possible through the driver. The transitions here are even worse to where it was very hard to tell the rhythm of the "heartbeat" at anything but the highest speed, and even then, only just so. I was afraid that relying on an LED sheet with tiny LEDs rather than larger, discrete ones coupled with all those layers between the LEDs and the keycaps would hurt, and unfortunately, such does appear to be the case here. Brighter LEDs would likely solve these issues here.

Testing the Force FX options was fun and frustrating at the same time. To begin with, I decided to use an existing profile Roccat includes, and Watch Dogs was the chosen one (mostly because I had a save file in the middle of the campaign already). The profile uses Force mode with two settings at different force levels for the WASD keys, with the default settings at 5% force and the Shift + default setting at 100%. All of these can be changed of course, as this also assumes you stuck with the default key mapping for the game. Shift + WASD initiates sprinting in Watch Dogs, which works fine as can be seen in the video above. The five indicator LEDs come in very handy here, and do of course make sure you have calibrated the keyboard first. However, when driving, shift + W just causes you to look back, so that ends up being a disaster if you are into the game and bottom out with a lot of force. This will just cause more frustrations, so keep the toggle button for switching between regular and Force FX modes handy for a switch back if need be.

Next up, I decided to create my own custom mode for F1 2012. Again, I have to apologize for the lack of newer racing sims here as I am not into that category much. Despite that, F1 2012 has excellent analog controls with XBOX 360 controller support, and I also wanted to try and see how the force mode would work here. For the first half, I used force mode with a custom key layout in the game as well, such as WASD was for steering and Q/E to shift the gear up/down respectively. The setup here was to have WASD at up ~75% force, while a tap at more with the W and S keys changed gears, which worked fairly well, but I had to keep my eye on the indicator LEDs a lot more than I liked - as evident from the poor driving you see. In the second half, I shifted to analog mode, and the game recognized that a controller was set up and went about trying to get me to press buttons corresponding to the controller that I could not use owing to the lack of available keys. Hopping back and forth between regular and Force FX mode got me back into the game, and I resumed recording. It was around the time when Massa overtook me (as Alonso) that I realized that the analog mode here was not working well even as I raced. It was fine when in a straight line, but changing directions around quick corners was not as responsive even with a custom force setting, and I ended up falling behind further as the laps around Spa continued. I am not convinced the game was not at fault here as it still showed my mouse cursor and responded to the Esc key after that, but nothing I did changed this in any of my other runs.

For the final demo, I wanted to see how analog mode would handle third-person games with good analog-control support built in. Enter Saints Row 4, and the first part of the video above is in regular mode with me trying to walk around at the same pace with WASD and getting hit by a car to demonstrate I am in regular mode (the prompt to press the space bar is an indicator here). Then, I switched over to analog mode by simply having WASD correspond to the D-pad controls, and you can see that I can walk slower or faster depending on how much force I apply. In fact, the slowest speed options are not even available without any analog controls or a controller here. A few more seconds of me trying to get hit to demonstrate I was in controller mode (the prompt to press the A button being the indicator here), and I tried some driving. After giving up on a car blocked by the driver, I took the bike, which responded wonderfully to the analog controls here. It was such a pleasure that I ended up playing another hour of this old game too.

The rest of the keyboard functions as expected. I no longer have a Roccat mouse, so I could not try out Easy-Shift[+] via another device, but everything else worked as expected. Some of the dedicated media-control buttons were very appreciated also, but they did feel a bit too far from where my hands normally would be on the keyboard. Similarly, be prepared to have the glossy section of the wrist rest smudge up when trying to hit the Thumbster keys while not looking down.


As always, the sound of a keyboard is based on more than just the switch type. So when comparing sound clips, consider the keyboard as a whole. In this case, I have provided above an example sound clip of me typing on the Roccat Isku+ Force FX sample at ~75 WPM. For context, you can find sound clips from other keyboards here, including those with membrane switches. I did bottom out here, as you simply must to actuate these membrane switches, and I also tried to capture the sound profile of the pressure-sensitive zone by lightly and strongly bottoming out the Q/W/E/A/S/D keys towards the end. They sound the same as the others, which is as expected, with the down- and up-stroke being the sources of noise here. I have no problems with membrane switches, but their utilization here will be judged by the market as one of necessity rather than choice given the nature of the pressure-sensitivity implementation here.